It’s hard to put a player like Taylor Twellman into words. Yet, for the better part of five years, that was my job.
As the color commentator for the New England Revolution from 2004 to 2009, I watched Twellman’s every move on the field during what I would consider his prime. And I was always at a loss to describe what I was seeing.
READ: Twellman calls time on legendary MLS career
Goal-scoring is intangible. A mystery, a black art. People—in particular, plodders like me who live in the methodical, square-pass-and-slide-tackle world of the defender—often say a goal-scorer has a “nose for the goal” or a “knack of being in the right place at the right time.” They play on instinct.
[inline_node:322481]But what does that mean, exactly?
No one can really define what goleadores do. There’s no teachable skill involved. No diagramable tactic. Nothing measurable about it at all—except the score.
And that’s where Twellman excelled. He wasn’t exceptionally skillful, fast, big, strong or creative. But he knew how to score—better than any American striker in recent memory.
In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that Twellman remains the only pure scorer the United States has ever produced.
Stats tell part of the story. He scored 101 regular-season goals in his career, good for sixth all-time in MLS. But he did that in just 174 appearances, which is 58 fewer that Landon Donovan, who is fifth all-time with 103 goals.
Twellman was good for a goal every 149 minutes, the best scoring rate of the top 10 scorers, just topping his longtime Golden Boot rival, Carlos Ruiz, who notched a goal every 150 minutes.
He struck 28 game-winning goals in his career, tied with Donovan for fourth most all-time. And he didn’t shrink in the postseason, hitting 10 goals in 21 playoff games, including two goals in MLS Cup finals.
But like I said, stats are only part of the story. Because Twellman had that other intangible quality: winning. During the ’00s, Twellman led the Revolution to four MLS Cup finals. And though the Revs fell at the last hurdle each time, they were the most consistently dominant juggernaut of the decade, winning two conference titles, the 2007 US Open Cup and two SuperLiga crowns. Twellman’s goals were a major component of all that hardware.
He scored them in just about every way imaginable: tap-ins from a Steve Ralston cross, breakaways at the end of a Shalrie Joseph throughball, long-range bombs, brave headers in the face of onrushing goalkeepers, sliding redirections at the far post and, of course, his now-famous bicycle against Chicago in the 2007 Eastern Conference Championship.
There are always going to be questions about why Twellman never made it at the international level—just six goals in 29 caps—particularly why he was left off the 2006 World Cup squad in favor of Brian Ching. He (and most of his Revolution teammates) just never seemed to click with the Arena and Bradley regimes.
But as Twellman steps away from the game because of medical reasons, I will remember something other than his goals or the MLS Cup losses or his international career. I will remember, ironically, his words.
Here’s the story: Over the course of his career, Twellman worked very hard with longtime Revolution assistant Paul Mariner to get better at the little things a well-rounded forward needs to do—playing with his back to goal, holding up the play, defensive positioning. It often went overlooked because of his goal-scoring.
But in the middle of the 2008 season, he was struggling to score. He was obviously operating at less than 100 percent, still regaining his fitness after an injury that had kept him out of the first half of the season. But he was doing those little things. And I said something about that on air.
After one game, he found me in the tunnel outside the locker room.
“Thanks,” he said.
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